Error Detection and Recovery in Compiler
Error encountered in different phases
- An important role of the compiler is to report any errors in the source program that it detects during the entire translation process.
- Each phases of compiler can encounter errors, after detecting errors, must be corrected to precede compilation process.
- The syntax and semantic phases handle large number of errors in compilation process.
- Error handler handles all types of errors like lexical errors, syntax errors, semantic errors and logical errors.
Classification of errors
Lexical phase errors
- These errors are detected during the lexical analysis phase.
- Exceeding length of identifier or numeric constants.
Lexical Phase Errors
1xab is neither a number nor an identifier. So this code will show the lexical error
- Appearance of illegal characters
printf Wikitechy("");$
This is a lexical error since an illegal character $ appears at the end of statement.
Example: switch is written as swich.
Panic mode Error Recovery:
- In this Method, Successive characters from the input are removed one at a time until a designated set of synchronizing tokens is found.
- Synchronizing tokens are delimiters such as ; or }
Advantage:
- It is easy to implement and guarantees not to go to infinite loop.
Disadvantage:
- Some inputs are skipped without checking it for additional errors.
Read Also
Syntactic phase errors
- These errors are detected during the syntax analysis phase
- Errors like semicolon missing or unbalanced parenthesis.
- Example: ((a+b* (c-d)). In this statement ) missing after b.
Syntactic Phase Errors
Statement mode Error Recovery:
- In this Method, when a parser encounters an error, it performs necessary correction on remaining input so that the rest of input statement allow the parser to parse ahead.
- It finds difficult to handle situations where actual error occurred before point of detection.
Semantic errors
- These errors are detected during the semantic analysis phase.
- Data type mismatch errors handled by semantic analyzer.
- Incompatible data type value assignment.
- Example: Assigning a string value to integer.
Semantic Errors